On Babies and Bombs

Summertime is when the Libertarian Party’s local affiliates typically participate in local festivals. Such festivals are a good occasion for the affiliates to meet the public in a low-stakes situation. Citizens come for light amusement and cotton candy, and maybe they return home with a novel thought implanted after speaking to us. Sometimes they leave us with such thoughts, as recently happened to me.

At these festivals – events like county fairs and harvest parties – the public readily shares its impressions about Libertarianism and politics in general. People don’t hold back when they expect never to see you again (even though we table at these events every year). They give you a piece of their mind, and this feedback pro or con is welcome. That said, some impressions which fair-goers share with us spring from factual misunderstandings, and one such recent exchange caught me off guard since I had never heard this sentiment expressed.

This year I volunteered for a local affiliate’s booth at its county fair. That midweek morning was very slow. A guy entered the pavilion and stopped at our booth after browsing the other nearby exhibits. The guy was visiting from New York City and inquired about the Libertarian position on the “social safety net.” Terms open to interpretation should always be defined, so I asked the guy what he meant by this. He explained that since New York State now subsidizes childcare for qualifying families, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani aims to eliminate all cost to childcare for certain people, several of this visitor’s neighbors in Manhattan have converted their rental apartments into daycare centers. He was asking, therefore, whether Libertarians support childcare’s subsidy.

The plain fact is that there are young couples who consciously decide not to have children because they cannot then afford it. Responsibly they realize that child-rearing requires significant amounts of money, especially on an unpredictable basis (as from accidents, sickness, etc.). On the lifecycle’s other end, there are older couples whose last chance to repair their finances comes when their kids have flown the nest and there are no more tuitions to pay. For the government to coerce such people to subsidize other people’s childcare, is to punish them with an externality after they have exercised the requisite responsibility in their own lives.

“Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else,” as said the 19th century French economist Frédéric Bastiat. The neighbors of this fair-goer from Manhattan receive government’s subsidies for childcare, but the naked truth is that government is extorting some people to redistribute that money to others who have not fully shouldered their decision to raise children. This visitor’s neighbors as the childcare providers are blameless in this situation. The government offers money for this service, so these providers respond accordingly to that disbursement.

It would be a different matter if government exempted families raising children from certain types of taxation. Libertarians recognize that taxation of any kind and in any amount is extortion. Yet in practical response to society as it currently exists, if government exempted a child-rearing family from income tax in a suitable amount per child, then that would be preferable to subsidization. With the savings, the family could better afford to pay directly for childcare. This arrangement of “tax credits” would at least lesson a family’s tax burden towards the ideal, which of course is no taxation whatsoever. It would also make the childcare providers directly responsive to the parents and children themselves since they would be the customers rather than governmental bureaucrats.

On the one hand, the visiting Manhattanite saw the wisdom in the Libertarian position, yet on the other, something did not sit well with him. He averred that “government should waste its money on childcare so there’s less money to waste on bombing other countries.”

The expression of such cynicism took me aback. Never would it have occurred to me that one governmental agency’s prodigality should be applauded because it denies funds to another agency which would waste them more harmfully. Of course, technically these are two separate governments (state government facilitates childcare, whereas the national government engages in military operations abroad), but it is fair to abstract both institutions as a single entity called “government” for our purposes. And expressed in this cynical way, it is impossible to deny the sense in this position.

However, two crucial errors inhere in the expressed position. Firstly, military expenditures abroad far exceed childcare on the local level. It is truly an inapt comparison if there ever was one. The $2.1 billion needed to construct just one Northrop B-2 Spirit long-range stealth bomber would easily buy a year’s worth of childcare for 100,000 kids. This goes to the whole guns versus butter controversy examined in any class on macroeconomics. Thus, it is a factual misunderstanding to posit that childcare consumes resources which otherwise the military would waste – or wastes them first as if childcare is “upstream” of the military, when in practice the expenditures may be considered simultaneous – since by scale alone the military outspends local childcare millions to one.

Secondly and importantly, if the citizenry adopts the position that one agency’s waste is justified against another less socially useful agency’s waste, then nothing limits governmental wastefulness. As long as one agency is considered “less socially useful” than another, both can squander any amount of resources. In practice, this may play out as a municipal Department of Parks which pays its employees twenty times more than what the private sector would pay them. Since the majority of citizens in this municipality prefer parks to libraries, they applaud the extravagance since it denies funds to the municipal library, which pays its employees ten times more than would the private sector.

Though the visitor’s novel sentiment nonplussed me, closer examination reveals it as fallacy. Valuable principles are scalable and universalizable. In this case, there is no way to justify profligacy in government only because profligacy in another agency could be worse in scale or effect.

Cynicism is bound to take hold of anyone who observes modern government for too long. If we descend to such abject resignation as to applaud a state Highway Authority’s extortion of taxpayers so that it can outspend the less popular Board of Education, there is no recovering our dignity as citizens.

It is not too much to demand that government – to the extent we need it at all – be efficient and effective. The citizenry toils hard for the revenue contributed to government. If government must exist at all, then it must honor that sacrifice by doing the bare minimum… and with maximum efficiency!